Food allergy and food intolerance: what difference?

If certain symptoms – especially digestive – are similar, food allergy and food intolerance are two very different reactions to the ingestion of a particular food. The first is immune, the other is not.

When you eat a food, you sometimes experience some side effects. These food reactions can be divided into two main categories: food allergy and food intolerances. From a scientific point of view, the big difference between the two is that theallergy is the result of an abnormal reaction from the immune system. While intolerance corresponds to a physiological response unrelated to the immune system.

So in case offood allergy, the antibody react on contact with a allergen specific. They cause the massive release of chemical mediators responsible for the appearance of symptoms which can be more or less serious: nausea, dermatitis, swelling in the throat, wheezing or difficulty breathing. Milk, eggs, peanuts, nuts, soy, the corn, the Pisces, seafood, mustard and sulfites are responsible for the majority of food allergies.

Food allergy and intolerance, not always easy to distinguish

In the event of food intolerance, the reaction results on the other hand from the fact that the organism shows itself incapable of metabolizing a food or one of its components; whether it is due to a characteristic of the food in question or to a characteristic of the individual. While allergies are triggered by protein, intolerances can be caused by any component. One can for example be intolerant to a sugar like the lactose or to a pharmacological compound such as caffeine.

Symptoms of intolerance are generally concentrated in the digestive system : pains abdominal, diarrhea, etc. But they can also take the form of headaches or rashes. Hence the difficulty sometimes, for a non-professional, to distinguish allergy and intolerance.

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